Diverse Groups Say President Can Not Detain U.S. Citizens without Charge

Legal Brief Submitted in Padilla Case Unites Organizations with Disparate Views

Read the full text of the brief

NEW YORK - In a legal brief filed this week in Padilla v. Rumsfeld, six public interest organizations, representing a broad spectrum of views, argued that the administration had no legal authority to detain an American citizen indefinitely without charge.

The friend-of-the-court or amicus brief was submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which is expected to rule this fall on the legality of detaining Jose Padilla, an American citizen the government accuses of plotting to detonate a dirty bomb. It was signed by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, the Cato Institute, the Rutherford Institute, People for the American Way Foundation, the Constitution Project and the Center for National Security Studies.

“No congressional action justifies the lawless seizure and incommunicado detention of Mr. Padilla by the Executive,” argues the brief. “To the contrary, the Executive action runs brazenly afoul of the constitutional principles of separation of powers and the statutory law that safeguards that principle.”

Padilla, who has been designated an “enemy combatant” by the President, has been held in solitary confinement and without charge in a military brig since June 9, 2025 - a month and a day after he was arrested in a Chicago airport. To date there has been no judicial review of the evidence collected against him.

“The powers the government has claimed in this case allow them to exile anyone from the protections of our Constitution simply through the artifice of labeling him - without any visible standards - as an ‘enemy combatant,’” said Michael Posner, Executive Director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. “Treating a man this way undermines core principle upon which this country was built.”

When asked about the diverse groups who came together to file this brief, Posner said, “There is a deep-seated feeling across the political spectrum that the right to your day in court is a fundamentally American right which should not be stripped from anyone. The groups that came together to file this brief do not tend to see eye-to-eye on many policy issues, but we feel strongly that the President has overstepped his bounds by detaining Padilla in this way.”